What is with everyone’s obsession, government or company, to moderate the web. It’s seriously depressing and exhausting.
Authoritarian tendencies since the web is a bit too close to providing its users with freedom of speech.
for real. it’s been extremely disconcerting watching both companies and nations erode and distort privacy norms so blatantly in the past few years. i’ve never really been a paranoid person, but it’s starting to feel like a coordinated effort to cut the metaphorical brakes so that when we approach the next digital privacy rights crossroad, we are completely unable to exert any control over the direction that society moves.
it used to be that i would hear about an attack on digital privacy once every year. now it seems to happen almost daily. it’s exhausting and worrying all at once.
I think the exhaustion is kind of the point. They want to desensitize us so that they can implement these changes with little pushback.
Ironically, the French figured out a cure for that around 240 years ago.
I feel like France in general has more of a history of its people being more politically active compared to other countries.
When the majority of your population also lives in the same metro area as your seat of government, it really helps.
oh i’m sure it is, and that’s what i think is so insidious about it. the tactics we’re seeing emerge appear to be carefully engineered so as to disproportionately exhaust those who care the most about preserving privacy so we just pack up and leave the platforms for them to ravage.
the average person who hears about proposed “web integrity” protections is going to think nothing of it and do nothing about it, then paint you as a conspiracy theorist for being as concerned as you are. i remember preaching to people about SOPA years ago, and was met with a resounding “meh”. they want the watchdogs specifically to leave their platforms, so that there is no one left to sound the alarms for everyone else.
Or maybe the average person is right by not overreacting?
Sucks that it’s so effective (in my eyes, at least). Sometimes I just have to make assumptions against the parties that stand to gain money because there’s so much disinformation.
Haven’t given up by any means, and I’m not only supporting my own interests - but dang. Find a hobby, Lindsey Grahams of the world.
Less democracy is what the ruling class wants; it gives them more control over their customers.
Don’t be exhausted. We can fight back
But how?
it used to be that i would hear about an attack on digital privacy once every year. now it seems to happen almost daily.
It could be that you’ve become more informed lately.
I feel like the situation has been deteriorating at a relatively steady pace for at least a decade, if not two.
facisim is on the rise again, that’s all.
Companies it’s because they want to be the ones serving you all the information and data and all the privileges that comes with like add profits, etc.
Governments because a huge global tool for information sharing, economics, etc grew under their noses for the last three decades and they ignored it until it was almost out of their control and are now panicking to try and grasp some back.
The Internet’s been ubiquitous for more than two decades now, and the people writing laws to regulate it in most democracies still lack even a high-level understanding about how it and the software they use to access it works. They also seem to go out of their way to avoid working with anyone who actually does know how to implement safety measures in less dangerous or exploitable ways. It’s inexcusable.
They ignore experts/scientists because they’re a liability when all you care about is personal financial gain and fulfilling the role your oligarch/corporate handlers bankrolled you to fulfil.
If browsers are forced to build this system to comply with French laws, it’s only a small step for other governments to leverage this new infrastructure and mandate bans on any website they don’t like.
thatsthepoint.jpeg
How do they propose to enforce this, when browsers are free and open-source and can easily be downloaded from hosts outside of France?
People that propose this kind of stuff always know exactly nothing about how the internet, or technology in general, works.
The Internet is a series of tubes, not a dump truck.
For those who don’t know, this is from senator Ted Stevens explaining how the internet works. Here is the audio:
YouTube links without context or a description are horrible.
Spend the extra 10 seconds to tell people why you feel they fit into the conversation.
Assume its rickroll
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/R8XSo0etBC4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Whoever owns this account should change the server used to show piped links because this server doesn’t work anymore.
Not taking their side, but politicians who say that a nuclear plant shouldn’t be built next to a nature preserve don’t have to know the exact physics going on inside it. Common sense and popular opinion that that would be stupid and unnecessarily risky is enough for the decision to stand.
One thing that would save the internet would be to require a passport to be able to use it, ie no more anonymity. Abuse or fakery should get draconian penalties.
I know that would be bad for people of certain countries with oppressive governments, but for the West it would stop the rise of mgtow fascism in its tracks.
Awesome! That way, the next time a minority starts connecting and coordinating using the internet, conservatives can silence them by doxxing them and threatening their families!
True, that’s a drawback but one with less severe consequences for humankind than if we just let this rise of fascism continue.
If the silencing and persecution of minorities is not part of your definition of “the rise of fascism”, you should really gain a better definition of the “fascism” actually is.
Fascism is very well defined and it’s not what you wrote. Just look it up.
And while you’re at it, look up “paradox of tolerance”, too.
When a plane with 20 people on board is bound to crash into a full football stadium with 70.000 people, you’d be the guy who decides to not shoot down the plane because the 20 people shouldn’t be weighed against possibly thousands dying if it crashed into the stadium.
The moral codex in Western countries is to cause as little loss as possible, so the 20 people on board will count less than the thousands on the ground.
Accordingly there oppressed minorities using the Internet to communicate won’t be weighed against the millions of people who’d die in a new Holocaust, which is the final goal of the new fascists.
Fascism is well-defined? With all due respect, this is the kind of statement that betrays a lack of knowledge of the field. Fascism is notorious in political science for being poorly defined both as a system of government and as an ideology.
What constitutes as a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall”.
For convenience, we can use the Wikipedia definition, which clearly signposts the oppression of political and social minorities as key parts of the definition of fascism.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
“Paradox of tolerance” does not justify literally any oppressive act.
And yeah, if a plane with 20 people on board is on a glide path towards a stadium, I’m going to be pretty skeptical of anybody who’s just champing at the bit to shoot it down. If we’ve got the time to talk about it, we can evacuate the stadium, or get in contact with the pilot, or scramble a jet to take a look inside and confirm if the occupants are incapacitated, or nudge a wingtip so that it glides into a less populated area. All of which have a better chance of success and are less disruptive than firing an armed missile within civilian airspace. Your unwillingness to consider less extreme options will inadvertently end up empowering authoritarians and enabling the very abuses you nominally wish to prevent.
You gave a perfect example of why politician decision SHOULD be based on technical knowledge and not only on what seems to be common sense or popular opinion.
In this case having a nuclear plant close to a close to a nature reserve could be a good idea.
A nuclear plant has a much lower impact on biodiversity than an agricultural field for exemple.
I didn’t.
In this case Mozilla likely has staff and contributors working out of France. Chances are they make money from there too. Mozilla would either need to forfeit the above or comply if the law is implemented.
Enforcement from decent sized economies can often be as simple as having too much economic power to ignore, which often isn’t that high of a threshold.
Sure, but again, it’s open-source - couldn’t somebody not legally affiliated with Mozilla offer a version of it from a server outside France with the blocking code removed?
Yes - but the vast majority of people are not going to be downloading forks or modified versions of software, they will always get it directly from the source.
The “default”, so to speak, has a lot of power.
They can probably enforce it on the major ones and that will be enough to censor 95% of the population.
They don’t have to. Because 90% of the population are either too lazy or too uniformed to do anything but download it from the first link that Google shows them, and the other 10% who care aren’t important enough to warrant enforcement.
The French government also recently proposed to force pornographic websites to ask their identity card or passport to french users before letting them access the content, to prevent minors from viewing it. Really stupid, ineffective and authoritarian. Children should not see pornographic content, but this won’t solve the problem. (the linked article is in french).
I don’t know what France is like these days, but as I see the US and my country flirting with conservative homophobic politicians, I absolutely refuse to tie the porn I browse to my government ID.
The far right is practically guaranteed to win the next presidential elections, a literal Nazi party has 90 MPs, moderate leftist politicians are being ostracized as “outside of the republican way”.
So, not very well.
Geez! Why is this shit happening everywhere? It’s like fascists got a direct connection to a lot of people’s brains.
Billionaires buying newspapers and TV channels in order to propagate their ideas. They like fascism better than socialism.
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Hot, but probably not too hot take: Other factors aside, people got dumber due to covid. They got literal brain damage. So when a reasonably intelligent person would be able to tell fascism as insustainable, they wouldn’t after their second or so infection.
The timing is wrong. The pandemic happened, at least in part, because fascism was already here before it started.
Trump clearly is fascist (and so is Bolsonaro, for the sake of argument), but that’s just two samples. Whereas e.g. france got rid of that Napoleon dude (you know who I mean) in favor of Macron.
I was making a much more narrow argument that the pandemic might have been averted entirely if not for the specific Trump policy I linked.
The pandemic got exacerbated in the US because of Trump’s dumbfuck negationist policies, but even countries with far tougher positions suffered pretty bad cases of COVID.
The CDC teams Trump shut down were designed to find new pathogens and stop them before they became pandemics. They might have prevented it from ever even leaving China and therefore saved the entire world from it, if they hadn’t been dismissed.
There was no Covid until late 2019, Trump, Alex Jones, Putin and other’s followers can’t use it as a Defense.
My take is that there is a link to the fact that energy is getting harder to access
The economy is directly related to energy, economic growth is linked to energy consumption growth. As long as we had plenty of fossil fuel easily available to economy was booming, the “American dream” period was also the period when the US was had a lot of oil field easily exploitable.
Thanks to this fossil fuel energy life was getting better every year for everyone. Everyone was getting a “bigger slice of cake” every year. In this context we’ve seen a lot of social progress.
Now energy is less accessible and most of the economic growth is going toward the 1% - 0.1% richest. So the “slice of cake” is now stagnating or even shrinking for most of the population. In this context fascism is tempting.
Using “Moderate leftist politicians” to depict Melenchon and its party is a very dubious take. And I won’t ho into the use of “nazi” for convenience, refardless of the truth of the matter.
Melenchon is a normal leftist, not far left. He is a social-democrat. I wish he was as extremist as the right wing says he is.
RN is definitely a Nazi party. It was founded by collaborators. They cannot erase their history, and they are still close to violent neo-Nazis groups.
No. You could reasonably argue that the LFI program is social-democrat, but their internal democracy is a joke, and JLM himself consider the Venezuelian political system to be a model while being remarkably tolerant of Russia’s imperialistic moves. This guy’s a crypto-tankie.
As for the RN, there are a fair number of fascists in the party (and nazis too, but that’s different), but they mostly seems there because there are no legal political formation further right. The voting base don’t particularly support them, and even the high management is annoyed by their presence/visibility… Even is their tolerance of it is far too much for my taste.
I insist on the “literal Nazi” part. One of the founder of the party, Léon Gaultier, fought with the Nazi in a Waffen-SS unit during the second world war.
All this will do is make people change which site they go to for their masterbatory needs.
I’ll just use the KFC website then. Pretty hot if you ask me.
Come on, do your thing french people! We know you want to!
This is too technical to incite the mass. Chances rely on parliament opposition and anti-constitutionality.
this is like preventing your car from driving you to the bank so you cant rob it
This might actually happen someday. Imagine: self-driving cars are the norm, car ownership is a thing of the past, you just hail an automatic cab and pay per ride.
In such a scheme the car company will probably know who you are, and the government could supply a blocklist of convicted criminals to prevent them from using their services.
That is utter stupidity.
What that proposes is to hold someone, anyone, guilty by default, with no proof.
That is what France wants for the Internet.
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I think the point was that they wouldn’t be able to go for non-robbing purposes, like opening an account for their daughter or whatever.
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Senile boomers try to do impossible things in tech because stupid. Censorship is stupid, Google and French goverment hand in hand trying to destroy the free and open internet.
WTF?! „… force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.“
Today it’s some terrorist / pedophile / fraudulent site, tomorrow it could be some opposition, news or whatever could be disliked site on that list.
If they can, they will.
Do they have this saying in France: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” ? These days, everyone seems so intent on breaking what we have that at the end I’m not sure what we’re going to have left.
Or how about “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” It’s not like the internet has suddenly changed. It’s basically been the same for decades in terms of ease of access to content. They say it’s to combat fraud, harassment and protect children. Who was doing that in the 90s? Who was doing that in the 2010s? No one. Society didn’t collapse. Children didn’t turn into depraved fiends when they grew up. What changed?
I think that’s besides the point. The social media boom (FB, Twitter, Insta, TikTok) was a point of no return for the internet, stepping out of its “only nerds spend time on it” reputation. Nowadays, everybody and their grandma can be taken for a ride by bad players on the internet, because (imho) let’s face it, most people are like deer in the headlights, they just can’t tell bad stuff from good on the internet.
The internet becoming such a phenomenon with the “unbathed masses” put it on the radar of the regulators much more than in the 2010s, and of course the 90s when only nerds were on it (myself included).
It’s like new designer drugs. When only few people know of them and use them, they remain legal until they become popular and people die from overdoses.
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No it hasn’t: Grandmas weren’t on the internet in the 90s.
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Just block it at the ISP who puts this feature into the actual browser has this country even used the web before???
Brother, you don’t know how fucking tech illiterate our government is (with a nice topping of being wannabe autocrats)
I assume they’re doing both to make the censorship harder to circumvent. Even with an alternative DNS provider or a VPN that’s hosted in a country they have no authority over, the browser’s still gonna catch it.
The harder you make it, the fewer people will attempt it and the higher the chance is that citizens will mess up.
- Ping website.ru
- Insert http://10.10.10.10 into browser.
Mastercraft hacking required to completely invalidate this effort.
How can I read more about that website? Is it a snowflake node or something?
It’s theoretical, it’s not a real website and 10.anything should be a local IP address.
It just illustrates that you can access a website through a browser without using a domain name.
I hate that these articles are always couched in excusatory language like, “While motivated by a legitimate concern…”
These people are not your friends, they’re your enemies. Don’t accept their frame in the argument.
whipped up a quick meme
I could see Mozilla being forced to comply and then letting it be known that if you delete a certain part of the firefox source and recompile, it goes away.
Why would they risk getting sued over helping the 0.0001% of their user base that’ll actually do this?
I wonder if it’d be more productive for them to just retreat from France. Show a different download page to French users that says it’s no longer available, but don’t geoblock the installer URLs.
I don’t think they can be forced to comply. Even if they have a local office they can just leave and tell Macron to fuck off. The government will probably force ISPs to block Mozilla’s website (at DNS level because politicians/idiots) and nothing will actually change.
The real shit would be if the EU wanted this…
An ‘unrelated third party’ would do it
They indicted 7 people for Terrorism last year because they encrypted their disks, used tail as their OS and signal for communication.
You’re saying France convicted people for terrorism purely because they used encryption? That’s a bold claim. What’s your source?
Hey thanks for that. I heard about it but couldn’t find any details about it
I’m not quite sure which case, I think it was about activists (not sure tho), but these fact were indeed used as an argument to support the idea that they were terrorists, because they’re trying to hide something
That’s a fucked up legal system…
The fact that you care about privacy means that you are hiding something which means that you are now a terrorist.
That sort of broken logic can apply to almost anything
The fact that you care about privacy means that you are hiding something which means that you are now a terrorist.
Closer to “we think you are terrorists, but cannot prove it because You’ve encrypted all the relevant sources of evidence. Therefore you must not only be hiding something, but hiding evidence that you did what we accused you of, which is clear evidence that you are a terrorist, or else you wouldn’t be hiding the evidence of your terrorism from us.”
Which is if anything even worse, since it presupposes that any accusation made is definitely true by default. Guilt until proven innocence has a bad track record.
Yep.
No, that wasn’t the “reason” like you want to make it sound by using because without any modifier like “also”.
How would adding “also” fit in my sentence. I tried but couldn’t.
“also because”?
English isn’t my native language but still it feels very off. Is it even correct ?
It’s my native language and I have no idea what they’re getting at either.
Don’t worry…
“Correct” as in an allowed use? Yes.
That just makes it harder to read :( I think the original sentence is grammatically fine.
More words make read harder, that’s right. But you can’t use fewer words if the meaning changes because of that.
“They indicted 7 people for Terrorism last year, in part because they encrypted their disks, used tail as their OS and signal for communication.” would work maybe.
